Real Time SEO: Monitor Your Brand & Build Links Simultaneously

In our day and age, nothing is becoming more important than monitoring your brand name. With websites like RipoffReport.com and Scam.com, you can find yourself looking for an SEO company to handle your Reputation Management in a hurry. Some companies often take it a step further, monitoring their executive management member’s names and their products and services names. The beautiful thing about monitoring your brand name is that you can use the time spent monitoring toward your link building efforts as well.

Using different methods and different tools, it is very easy to follow what people are saying about your brand. When someone references your brand, you can immediately reach out to that individual and thank them (if it is a good mention) and ask them for a link to your website. You might even ask for specific anchor text to be used and leverage that opportunity for maximum SEO effectiveness. These are some of the easiest, most beneficial, and natural looking links you can acquire to diversify your link portfolio.

What if you took this a step further? What if you used these methods and tools to monitor chatter in your industry and around your keywords and keyphrases? You could not only promote your brand by answering people’s questions, but you could find additional link partners with those people who are already talking about your industry and the specific keywords you are targeting.

There are many different tools that can be leveraged in finding these link building opportunities. I will discuss my favorites and how I use each of them below.

Trackur

Trackur is a full on, brand monitoring service created by Andy Beal. They have a free version where you can have one search query saved and monitored on a regular basis. Most might think that one saved search query is lame, but I run dozens of keywords on a regular basis through Trackur. You just run them one at a time and export the results into a .csv file. I can then take the file and see who is talking about my brand or keywords and where. I can then reach out to them and attempt to create strong link partnerships. Trackur will deliver news, blog, twitter, and other current results. I have found it to be quite extensive and worth every minute of my time.

Replyz

I would classify Replyz, as a real time search engine that delivers questions from individuals who are trying to learn about a particular topic, whether it be a brand or a keyword. Within Replyz, anyone can tap into the real-time stream and monitor keywords, keyphrases, brand names, and just about any thing else being asked on Twitter and on Replyz. When someone asks a question and mentions the words that you are monitoring, it is automatically added to your dashboard. Once it is added to your dashboard, you can easily answer it from your Replyz account, thus promoting your brand.

Reaching out to these individuals first is crucial to building their trust with your website and what you have to offer them. If you portray yourself as an authority in the space, you might even get a link out of it.

Openbook

Openbook is also another real-time search engine where you can search Facebook updates about any keyword, keyphrase, or brand and see what people are talking about. Unlike Twitter’s free for all when connecting with people, Facebook requires you to connect via friend requests and direct messages. The upside of connecting via friend requests and direct messages is that you can build a rapport with those who are willing to let you into their friend circle and leverage those relationships to build your business and ask for links.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is probably my least favorite method to monitoring brand names and keywords, however, it does provide some value so it is at least worth a mention. Within Google alerts you can monitor different search terms and Google will deliver news, blogs, video, and discussions around those search terms to the RSS reader of your choice. I pull it into my Google Reader, but you can take the feed URL supplied and monitor it wherever your heart desires. In Google Alerts, I tend to monitor brand mentions and visit those sites talking about my brand and ensure that they are linking to my website. If not, I contact the editor and ask for a link. This seems to work better if the mention is recent. The older the mention gets, the less success I seem to have with this tactic.

Social Mention

Social Mention is like Google Alerts, but for social media. Just like Google Alerts, you can search on brand names and keywords being discussed in the social media sphere and leverage those opportunities to obtain links. Some of the sites they monitor are Identica, Twitter, Youtube, Delicious, Photobucket, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, Digg, Techmeme, Yahoo News, Myspace, Faves, and many others.

Whos Talkin

Whos Talkin is also a social media search tool that should be used in conjunction with Social Mention. Whos Talking searches blogs, news, networks, videos, images, forums, and tags and delivers relevant search results around the brand name or keyword searched on. This tool will not only help you find link acquisition opportunities, but see what the competition is doing in the different realms so you can catch up with or stay ahead of them in the different spaces.

There will be some overlap when using all of these tools, but I have found it to be very minimal and very effective to build natural looking links that will not only help increase your search engine rankings, but also drive relevant traffic to your websites.

If you have any other tools that work really well, please share with us in the comment section.

Greg is an experienced marketing professional with a heavy emphasis on internet marketing, more specifically search engine optimization (SEO) and generating online revenue via affiliate marketing.

Andy Beal

Thanks for sharing your creative use of Trackur!

While you're free to run as many new searches as you wish, only by saving your search will you get the most out of Trackur. You see, each time you run a new search we only show a snapshot of new results. When you save it, we then do a thorough search every 30 minutes.

Maybe it's time to upgrade to the Ultimate plan and get a nice branded version of the dashboard--complete with unlimited saved searches! ;-)

Cheers guys!

Andy

Greg Shuey

Andy,

Thanks for the comment and further insight on how valuable the paid version of Trackur is. We love your tool here at SEO.com and will continue to use it and promote it!

Greg

Andy Beal

Thanks Greg! If you ever need anything, just let me know.

Andy

Roshan

i have used Google Alerts and found very useful. looking forward to use others for comparison as well.

Heinrich

Monitoring your brand awareness and reputation is essential. I have never thought of using the time spend on this to also build links. Thank you for opening my eyes to new opportunities.

Lyena Solomon

I use BrandsEye. The basic version is $1/mo and you can say it is free. They monitor blogs, articles, and other posts; not Twitter or Facebook, as far as I understand.

I like that they let me tag the found articles as "unrelated", "related" and "duplicate". The software learns from my selections and adjusts the search query. It is very helpful for the brands which name is not a made-up word or two.

Customer service is great too - they really try to help the newbies and will look at your settings if you would like them to help.